Latin: translated literally as “nourishing mother”, a phrase used in ancient Rome to refer to various mother goddesses, in Christianity is has been used for the Virgin Mary, though not so much in modern times.  Its primary current usage is to refer any school, college or university that one has attended and/or graduated from.

For me, my Alma Mater is Saint Stanislaus’ College; I could say my Almae matres are Stella Marris, Saint Stanislaus’ College and the University of Guyana, having attended them as my primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions.

But for me, it will always be “Saints”, there I spent my formative years, my adolescent youth, where I formed life-long friendships, where I had teachers (and a lack of teachers) and memories (good and bad) that refuse to go away.

I had done a blog late last year, on some of the Latin phrases that have stuck with me to this day, if you haven’t read it, it’s not just about my Alma Mater, but about “Monuments”

Last year while looking for subjects to photograph for the Deck Project, I took a midday walk with Nikhil towards Brickdam with the very specific intention and aim of taking a few photographs of the building.  During and after photographing it, I was not satisfied, so we continued on down Brickdam to take a few other photographs, one of which I used for that week’s Deck Photo (2011 Deck – Week 13).

Every so often, I go through my older images, and on reaching the photos that I had taken of my Alma Mater, I was moved to view them differently,  One stood out from the rest, but I was still not happy with it as it was,  I decided to try a Psuedo-HDR out of it, I created two alternate exposures in Lightroom, one at -3ev (to retain some detail in the sky) and one at +3ev (although to be honest, I don’t think I really wanted more details in the shadows for this one).  I did the HDR combining and tone-mapping in Nik HDR Efex Pro.  I didn’t really want a coloured image as the final product, so in the HDR processing, I did a conversion to monochrome as well.

Please click on the image for a much better view in the Gallery, unlike most of my black and white images, I placed this one in the Georgetown Gallery.